Hitch Haikoo

A hitchhiking memoir by a writer who began hitching at age 12 (locally, to and from the beach near his Long Island home, early 1960s). Later, as a means of cheap or free travel for a young impoverished student, hitchhiking had practical value and, when time allowed, offered opportunities for road adventures in a widening world. Hitch Haikoo began as a long series of short poems written while the writer was hitchhiking around Ireland, in 2000. Layered upon those poems (which appear at the end of the book) is a series of essays relating experience and observation of a once-acceptable form of transit that diminished with a public imagination and culture embracing fear and mistrust of others. How many hitchhiking news stories or movies have you seen with a happy ending, as opposed to bloodshed? Few if any. Yet for the writer and for countless others, hitchhiking, while arduous, was replete with happy endings, as in, getting there on the fuel of human kindness. This book relates how that once was, not so long ago.